with Émilie Girard-Charest _ composition and cellist

Choreography and composition _ Sarah Bronsard

Composition et choreography _ Émilie Girard-Charest

External eye _ Anne Thériault

45 minutes

Le frottement du monde is a choreographic project initiated with Émilie Girard-Charest in 2012 and which culminated in my research-creation at the master's level in the Dance Department of UQAM during a presentation on March 12, 2017. The creation was accompanied by Anne Thériault as an outside eye and artistic advisor, and the dissertation-creation is under the direction of Nicole Harbonnier-Topin, in co-direction with Caroline Raymond.

In order to explore the interest we shared in the encounter between gesture and sound, we took the sound of touch as our starting point. The friction of the world has been interested in the intimacy of two surfaces that meet and communicate their differences: even with a smooth appearance, they are textured when you look at them more closely. Asperities, calluses, roughness are brought into contact and revealed by a common voice: without the other they do not ring. Likewise, on a string instrument there is the need for friction. Throughout the creative process, we were interested in the tension, the waiting and the restraint which herald the possibility of an opening: what happens before the vibration, before the harmonic sound and the resonant body. Le frottement du monde is the zone of constant friction between practices, between beings, between oneself and the world: that which strives gently, that which wears out breaks, becomes more flexible, is transformed.

Through my research-creation, I explored different meeting points between dance and music. Having arrived to dance by flamenco, where the dancer participates fully in musical creation and where the musician is inhabited by great bodily expressiveness, I became interested in the sound, visual and kinesthetic dimension of the exchange between dancer and musician. My initial hypothesis postulated that a work of bodily tuning, touching on the expressiveness of the bodies and all that forms and informs this expressiveness, would open a disciplinary border between dance and music. In the studio, we let ourselves be guided by everything that emerged between gesture, sound, haptic touch, musical and choreographic writing, human questioning and a lot of listening.

Studio 303 (Montreal), as an independent production, September 30th 2017.

Le frottement du monde received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for the musical composition.

Loan of rehearsal spaces and equipment from the UQAM Dance Department.

Donation of bow hair from Wilder&Davis luthiers.